NO TIME TO KEEP CALM

Saturday, 19 May 2018

The overt corruption of the American
presidency is happening more or
less in plain sight.

This past week news broke about a number
of recent deals involving Trump, his family, hangers-on and his enablers, that
show that the worst fears about Trump’s potential conflicts of interest
expressed prior to his election were entirely justified. Last year’s efforts by Michael Cohen to
enrich himself based on his closeness to Trump pale in comparison to the
hundreds of millions of dollars that Trump’s family is raking-in through the
patriarch’s political position. The
dealings of the Trump Organization, now under the notional management of
Trump’s two adult sons, but still owned by the President, are prime examples of
the corrupt self-dealing enrichment evidently going on. The China
and the Lido City project in Indonesia is a good example – Trump promising
to save jobs in, wait for it, China, and disregarding his own
administration’s concerns about cybersecurity lifting sanctions against ZTE
in the process – and in apparent return, receiving Chinese financial backing
for his next mega development in Indonesia.

Saturday, 17 March 2018

The Deputy
Director of the FBI, Andy McCabe was fired by Attorney General Jeff Sessions on
Friday evening, 16 March, 26 hours
before McCabe was due to retire with a full pension.While the public has no way to judge whether
the cause for dismissal stipulated by Sessions was justified, the timing of
this decision and the broader context to it, suggest that even if McCabe was
guilty of some misconduct, this whole episode reeks of the extreme Trumpian politicization
of the institutions of justice in the USA.

Sessions
statement indicated:

After an extensive and fair investigation and according to Department of
Justice procedure, the Department’s Office of the Inspector General (OIG)
provided its report on allegations of misconduct by Andrew McCabe to the FBI’s
Office of Professional Responsibility (OPR).

The FBI’s OPR then reviewed the report and underlying documents and
issued a disciplinary proposal recommending the dismissal of Mr. McCabe.
Both the OIG and FBI OPR reports concluded that Mr. McCabe had made an
unauthorized disclosure to the news media and lacked candor—including under
oath—on multiple occasions.

The FBI expects every employee to adhere to the highest standards of
honesty, integrity, and accountability. As the OPR proposal stated, “all
FBI employees know that lacking candor under oath results in dismissal and that
our integrity is our brand.”

Pursuant to Department Order 1202, and based on the report of the
Inspector General, the findings of the FBI Office of Professional
Responsibility, and the recommendation of the Department’s senior career
official, I have terminated the employment of Andrew McCabe effective
immediately.

The public has
no way to judge the validity or justice of this statement.The reports on which the decision was taken
are not public and won’t be for some time.McCabe may well have committed misconduct deserving of dismissal. The
FBI ostensibly takes telling the truth extremely seriously: “lack of candor”
from employees is a fireable offense—and agents have been fired
for it. It also needs to be noted
that career Justice Department and FBI officials – rather than political
appointees selected by Trump – ran the investigation against McCabe.The charges against McCabe arose out of the
broader Justice Department Office of Inspector General (OIG) investigation into
the FBI’s handling of the Clinton email investigation. The current head of that office, Michael
Horowitz, was an Obama appointee and is himself a former career Justice
Department lawyer. As Jack Goldsmith has written, the inspector general has statutory
independence, and Horowitz used that independence in his highly critical 2012
report into the Justice Department’s “Fast and Furious” program. So this
investigation into McCabe should not be dismissed out of hand as politically motivated.
We should reserve judgment on that.

A
representative for McCabe stated that the deputy director learned of his firing from the press
release, though the Justice Department disputes this. McCabe was dismissed
for “lacking candor” when speaking to investigators on the matter of an
“unauthorized disclosure to the news media.” McCabe denies these allegations.
In his statement released to the media after his firing, McCabe
wrote:

The investigation by the Justice Department's Office of Inspector
General (OIG) has to be understood in the context of the attacks on my credibility.
The investigation flows from my attempt to explain the FBI's involvement and my
supervision of investigations involving Hillary Clinton. I was being portrayed
in the media over and over as a political partisan, accused of closing down
investigations under political pressure. The FBI was portrayed as caving under
that pressure, and making decisions for political rather than law enforcement
purposes. Nothing was further from the truth. In fact, this entire
investigation stems from my efforts, fully authorized under FBI rules, to set
the record straight on behalf of the Bureau, and to make clear that we were
continuing an investigation that people in DOJ opposed.

The OIG investigation has focused on information I chose to share with a
reporter through my public affairs officer and a legal counselor. As Deputy
Director, I was one of only a few people who had the authority to do that. It
was not a secret, it took place over several days, and others, including the
Director, were aware of the interaction with the reporter. It was the type of
exchange with the media that the Deputy Director oversees several times per
week. In fact, it was the same type of work that I continued to do under
Director Wray, at his request. The investigation subsequently focused on who I
talked to, when I talked to them, and so forth. During these inquiries, I
answered questions truthfully and as accurately as I could amidst the chaos
that surrounded me. And when I thought my answers were misunderstood, I
contacted investigators to correct them.

The report on
the Clinton email investigation is to be released later this spring. Without seeing the report, it’s
impossible to know whose story reflects the truth here.But even if McCabe’s conduct was bad enough
to warrant dismissal, the timing and the expedited nature of the process is
rancid in its overt political overtones.

Michael
Bromwich, a former Justice Department inspector general who is representing
McCabe, described how the process against McCabe was uniquely prejudicial. As he describes it:

The investigation described in the Office of the Inspector General (OIG)
report was cleaved off from the larger investigation of which it was a part,
its completion expedited, and the disciplinary process completed in a little
over a week. Mr. McCabe and his counsel were given limited access to a draft of
the OIG report late last month, did not see the final report and the evidence
on which it is based until a week ago, and were receiving relevant exculpatory
evidence as recently as two days ago. We were given only four days to review a
voluminous amount of relevant evidence, prepare a response, and make
presentations to the Office of the Deputy Attorney General. With so much at
stake, this process has fallen far short of what Mr. McCabe deserved.

Now Bromwich
may well be exaggerating to a degree: lawyers do. But the haste with which the
proceedings against McCabe were conducted do seem to fit with McCabe’s own
perspective on the events provided in his statement after his firing:

The release of this report was accelerated only after my testimony to
the House Intelligence Committee revealed that I would corroborate former
Director Comey's accounts of his discussions with the President. The OIG's
focus on me and this report became a part of an unprecedented effort by the
Administration, driven by the President himself, to remove me from my position,
destroy my reputation, and possibly strip me of a pension that I worked 21
years to earn. The accelerated release of the report, and the punitive actions
taken in response, make sense only when viewed through this lens.

The irregular timing
also has to be seen in the broader context of McCabe being in Trump’s
crosshairs since the firing of FBI director James Comey. Trump has publicly
demanded his firing on multiple occasions, he developed a conspiracy theory
about McCabe’s wife, whom he told McCabe was a “loser.” He demanded
to know whom McCabe had voted for. According to James Comey’s testimony before the Senate intelligence committee, Trump
attempted to use what he believed to be McCabe’s corruption as some kind of a
bargaining chip against Comey, informing the director that he had not brought
up “the McCabe thing” because Comey had told him that McCabe was honorable.Trump has relentlessly attacked McCabe’s
integrity and reputation as part of his attacks on the FBI and DOJ.And to make matters worse, the firing
occurred when Jeff Sessions’s own job is clearly on the line. Sessions may well be serving-upMcCabe in an effort to appease Trump.

Even if the
case against McCabe justifies his dismissal, who is going to believe – in the
face of overt presidential demands for a corrupt Justice Department – that a
Justice Department that gives the president what he wants is anything less than
the lackey he asks for? Regardless if
McCabe committed a fireable offense or this is a political attack on McCabe the
politicization of law enforcement takes place regardless. It is the consequence
of the relentless attempts to
politicize the federal justice system that have been a hallmark of the
Trump era.

Friday, 16 March 2018

Trump is moving towards the administration cast he is comfortable with. And that is a problem.

At the very
beginning of the Trump administration I, and many others, expected there would
be a ‘house cleaning purge’ of key
government departments.Although the
early White House was home to some of the ideologues that had flocked
to Trump during the campaign, the administration was actually divided into a
number of often
competing power centres.

But in addition
to the first year’s historic
cabinet turnover, over the past couple of weeks, Trump has lost his
economic adviser, Gary Cohn, who resigned over the imposition of steel and
aluminum tariffs; he fired his secretary of state, Rex Tillerson, over Twitter,
essentially for occasionally speaking is actual mind; and he is reportedly
planning on moving his national security advisor, H.R. McMaster, out of the
White House and back into a military position as a four-star general.McMaster – whose removal has been rumored for
months – would be gone already, except the
White House is apparently concerned about the optics of losing yet another cabinet
member.

These changes suggest that Trump is now
fully breaking free of the modest restraints that were erected around him early
on in his presidency by GOP advisors to protect against his erratic instincts. While scandal, chaos and incompetence have
forced Trump to remake his cabinet, by now filling it with hawks and cable news
pundits, he is turning it into a reflection of his own image.

While fears
of the inherent corruption of his own family members such as Kushner
failed attempt to secure a loan from Qatar and subsequent Kushner green-lighting
of the Saudi/UAE blockade of Qatar have been proved correct,the
incomplete revelations of Russia investigation and scandal have caused the sideling
of most of the familial wing of the White House.Two White House aides who were close to the pair resigned.
(Hicks and Kushner press aide Josh Raffel). Kushner’s
access to classified information has been curtailed. “Javanka” appears to be having fairly limited influence in
Trump’s Washington.

And while the “economic nationalism” that
was also central to Bannon’s ideology had been largely sidelined by Trump in
his working with the GOP on lowering taxes, his decision to push forward tariffs on aluminum and steel imports, a policy backed by
White House trade adviser Peter Navarro, is a return to the position he and Bannon advocated as a candidate.
Meanwhile, social conservatives within
the administration have either convinced Trump of their own agenda, Trump
already agreed with it or they are just doing what they want while the president
isn’t paying attention. DeVos,
Pruitt
and other agency leaders in the Trump administration are rolling back
regulations at an aggressive pace with little interference from the White
House. The administration has either tried to enact or actually adopted a number of limits to abortion, a priority of Vice President Mike Pence’s. In
fact, it’s hard to think of many major decisions Trump has made that break with
the ideology of his vice president.It
is for this reason, that no matter what he has said over the past weeks it seems very unlikely that Trump will move in
any meaningful way towards gun control.

And now the so-called “adults in the room” Tillerson, McMaster, and Secretary
of Defense James Mattis have been removed or neutralized, and Chief of Staff
Kelly has shown himself to be more Trumpian than many had anticipated. All in all, Trump is moving towards creating the
cabinet and White House that he wants: one that either shares key Trump views, channels
the views of his socially conservative base, or won’t stand up to him in any
meaningful way.

Changes at the cabinet level mirror
those that have been made in various key government departments.On 15 March 2018, the ranking Democrats on
the House of Representatives Government Reform Oversight committee and
Committee on Foreign Affairs sent a letter to the Trump Administration demanding a response to the claims made
by a whistleblower that systematic ‘cleansing’ of career staffers not thought
‘loyal’ enough to Trump.The letter
builds on reporting going back over a year of political interference in the staffing of
non-political positions in various departments.Taking political considerations into account in hiring, or in other personnel
decisions, for career positions is illegal under US law.This is a core principle that reinforces the
independence and professionalism of career government employees found in all
mature democracies. But independence and
professionalism are concepts not just lost on Trump the bullshit artist, but are completely at odds with his notion of the government as a
private business run to his whim and direction.

There is no reason to think that such
political interference has been limited to the State Department.Not only did Trump and his advisors likely
run afoul of US federal law in that chaotic period from the transition to the
leaving of Reince Priebus, but the quality of the hacks, hangers-on, and
supplicants involved suggests they weren’t even aware of the boundaries they
were running up against – a combination of malfeasance and cluelessness that
sets up perfectly for politically motivated decisions not just in the State
Department but across the government.

All this
suggests that despite the normalization of the administrative chaos of
Trumpocracy, there has been a slow but steady movement towards the kind of
supporting cast of sycophants that Trump was used to in his business.This is absolutely not a good development.

Wednesday, 7 March 2018

Over the past few days a number of details
have emerged about the Mueller-led “Russia” investigation’s interest in the
Trump campaign’s dealings in the middle-east, most particularly with the United
Arab Emirates.What does the UAE have to
do with the Russia investigation?Potentially quite a bit.The
direct tie is due to one George Nader, a Lebanese-American member of the Trump
circus who seems to have been a quite active arranger for Trump and his family,
particularly, Jared Kushner.

According to New York Times reporting, Nader was
returning to the US on 17 January, 2018, when he was met by FBI agents at
Dulles airport with search warrants and a subpoena. Nader was in transit to Florida for the celebration
of Trump’s first year in office at Mar-a-Largo. But he was stopped by the FBI, who confiscated
all his electronics, questioned him at length and almost immediately turned him
into a cooperating witness for the Mueller investigation. He’s already made at least one appearance
before Mueller’s grand jury.

The fact that the FBI apparently
presented him with evidence against him serious enough to compel immediate
cooperation suggests that Mueller’s team were not merely looking for further
leads in their investigation. Why might
he be important enough to warrant such attention?As both the Times and CNN
have explained, Nader was a participant and perhaps even the convener of the
Trump Transition team’s meeting in the Seychelles which brought together a
representative of President Trump (Erik Prince) with representatives of both
Russian President Putin and the government of the United Arab Emirates. He continued to have on-going contact with the
Trump White House. Most importantly
appears to have been an interlocutor with Jared Kushner in Kushner’s dealings
with Gulf states, which connect up with Kushner
family’s failed attempt to secure a loan from Qatar and subsequent Kushner
green-lighting of the Saudi/UAE blockade of Qatar. While the other Gulf states had their own
clear motives for punishing Qatar, the fact the Kushner backed Qatar’s
diplomatic isolation after failing to get money from its sovereign investment
fund to bail-out his own family’s real estate debts, suggests a level of potential
criminal corruption within the White House that is clearly legally
actionable.And Nader may well be a key
witness in this particular focus of the investigation. Mueller’s investigators are also reportedly
examining whether Nader helped facilitate illegal transfers of foreign funds to
the Trump campaign during the 2016 election.

The Nader story suggests that:

1. all those observers who have
been saying that Mueller appears to be mainly pursuing an obstruction
investigation against Trump rather than a collusion (or
more accurately, a conspiracy against the United States) investigation are
wrong. Mueller seems to be pursuing very
serious investigations into alleged crimes which have nothing to do with
obstruction of justice on the part the President.He is likely to be pursuing the obstruction
angle as well, but those expressed fears/hopes that there was evidence of a pattern
of obstruction but no evidence of the crimes that the obstruction was meant to hide,
seem to me to be wrong.Mueller is
investigating both serious crimes and the subsequent conspiracy to hide them.

2. there are clearly sovereign
actors involved in addition to Russia. The UAE, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and Turkey may all
be involved, if not as primary actors than as targets or collateral damage – Qatar
for instance, which Kushner tried to shakedown for a half billion or more to
save his family business and the subsequent blockade by the rest of the Gulf
states.And Michael Flynn’s story is as
tied to Turkey as it is Russia. Thereare indications here that the Trump administrations actions in the Middle East,which we’ve known to involve Kushner’s money begging, are connected with
Russia’s efforts to cultivate the Trump syndicate as well as interfere in the
2016 election. Personally, I’ve been
very skeptical of the maximal
interpretations of the Qatar story which connects Kushner’s money troubles with
Russia and the Steele Dossier. But maybe
there is something there: Mueller’s recent tack in the investigation suggests
there might be.

3. Jared Kushner’s finances and activities are as much a part of this as Donald
Trump’s and may go places even Trump did not.Losing his security clearance might be the least of Kushner’s worries.

Friday, 16 February 2018

The depth of detail in the indictment filed today by Mueller's Russian investigation team is quite amazing and should put to rest all but the most deluded conspiracy theorists about Russia's active interference campaign. Its important to note that this indictment makes no claims about the impact of the campaign nor does it identify Americans as willing co-conspirators. But the sheer amount of detail, and the fact that it is unlikely that the much of the evidence collected by Mueller's team is in this charge document, should make Trump and his gang even more nervous. Because although this document might show "no collusion" there are plenty of indications within the indictment that the other shoe might well be dropping down the road. As there is little chance that any of the named conspirators in the indictment will ever face US justice, this is a 'speaking indictment': it sets out a narrative of events onto which later pieces of the investigation will be mapped. It provides a base to which other bad actors can be connected.

But clearly details are included or not
included in this indictment for reasons we cannot know. For instance, take a look at Item 81 in the indictment (see below). This item is part of a detailed
chronology of events, and yet it doesn't quite fit.

Page 29

[The passage was highlighted and annotated by Josh Marshall in his column on Talking Points Memo].

What is described here is the updating of a list of US residents with who the defendants have been in contact and
are working with Russian operatives (knowingly or not). The inference is clear that it was created at some point in the past, and likely updated many times, possibly after this date. But why is this update included in this very precise indictment? Why is this important enough to be noted?

So no obvious, direct, connections but a critical and busy point in the campaign, with some suggestive possible connections. I don't think the inclusion of this notice of an update of a list of Americans contacted to assist the Russian campaign in the indictment is of no consequence. The Mueller investigators know a lot more than they are currently saying. I expect that some of the people on that list will be important when Mueller's other shoe drops in the months to come.

Wednesday, 14 February 2018

On the British hearings in Washington about Social Media's role in spreading political misinformation

It didn’t get
much mainstream press in North America, but last week 11 British MPs held
hearings in Washington investigating US technology companies and their
responsibility for monitoring and/or preventing malicious "news" content on
their platforms. This hearing was the first ever select committee session to be live-streamed
from abroad.Why the committee chose to hold
its hearings in the US is unclear, but it may be a sign of both how seriously
the UK is taking this issue and of how important it is that the inquiry be
highly visible on both sides of the Atlantic.

Wednesday, 31 January 2018

The Dangers of the Current Moment

While Trump gave his first
State of the Union in a fashion clearly meant to be conventionally “presidential”,
developments in the ongoing attack on the credibility of the FBI and the
Mueller investigation by the White House and its and GOP enablers have moved in
a very dangerous direction.Last year
right after FBI director Comey was fired, lots of commentators worried aloud about the slide towards autocratic rule that
further meddling in the independence of the career officials at the Department
of Justice would entail. After all, it was a major campaign pledge of Trump:
wielding the Justice Department’s immense power as a political weapon.

Wednesday, 25 October 2017

What’s known about the provenance of
the infamous Steele memo on Trump-Russia collusion.

Recent revelations in
the Washington Post about the funding of the opposition research memo prepared
by British ex-Spy, Christopher Steele, has caused a storm of controversy (at
least among conservatives in the US), with pundits on the political right
suggesting this funding history indicates the dossier is a partisan ‘hack’ job,
and that Hillary Clinton should actually be investigated for collusion with
Russians.

The following is a
timeline of what has been made public about the origins and funding of the
Steele dossier, compiled from Washington Post,
the New York Times, publicly
accessible court documents and reporting in Talking
Points Memo, Mother Jones and
other reputable media outlets.

Friday, 25 August 2017

While much of North America
is worried about the impending landfall of a potentially catastrophic hurricane
in Texas, the US
president has quietly pardoned the Arizona Sheriff recently convicted of
racial profiling and refusing to obey a federal court’s injunction against
continuing such practices. Trump’s
pardoning of Joe Arpaio may seem like a rather minor issue compared to the
litany of major issues that have bedeviled this president, or indeed the
impending disaster facing South East Texas. I don’t want to diminish those other issues, but I want to highlight why
this pardon is also a very big deal.

Trump has recently mused
publicly about the extent of his pardon powers.
And the Arpaio pardon his may well be the trial run of a string of pre-emptive
pardons. But even if it isn’t, the suggestion
that Arpaio merited a pardon, as he hinted at his Phoenix political rally with the phrase that Arpaio had
been “convicted for doing his job” is indicative of the contempt Trump holds
for the rule of law and to his willingness to use the Presidency’s judicial
privileges for crass political gain.

Normally, a president
considering a pardon solicits and make publicly available the recommendation of
the Department of Justice. However, in
this case that is unlikely to have happened since it was Trump’s own Department of Justice that secured the very
conviction for criminal contempt that is the subject of the pardon. A president can ignore a DOJ recommendation,
but the DOJ’s participation is one check on the abuse of this extraordinary power
in the hands of a president. And even Attorney
General Sessions was hardly likely to recommend a pardon for a law enforcement
officer convicted of willfully and openly flouting a federal court order,
prosecuted by his own department.

Moreover, this case is
still active with Arpaio’s lawyers preparing an appeal of a decision that was only issued this past July. Normally (and this pardon just goes to
underline how far from ‘normal’ the US has travelled in the past 7 months),
this would be a strong reason for a pardon to be thought entirely premature:
the president is literally intervening in the middle of an ongoing legal
proceeding. Thus the pardon circumvents
normal judicial process and has the appearance of being (and substantively is) a
direct interference in the regular administration of justice. Trump has already shown himself to have difficulty
grasping and respecting the independent and impartial operation of federal law
enforcement. With this act, Trump has dramatically escalated the assault
on these limits.

Trump is pardoning a
political ally who quite deliberately flouted the law and did so as a law
enforcement officer. It places Trump, again, on the side of bigotry and racism. Trump has already made political spectacle of Arpaio
in order to placate some of his restive critics: at his Phoenix political rally
he asked, “Do people in this room like Sheriff Joe,” showing explicitly the
very defined political audience for the pardon.
Perhaps Trump thought that pardoning Arpaio would bring political gain without
cost. It is true that this pardon cannot
be stopped and will please the Trumpite base.
But it will also not escape the attention of Mueller and his team as
they investigate obstruction of justice and evaluate evidence bearing on Trump’s
motives and lack of respect for law.

Unlike a pardon of himself,
family members, or aides in the Russian investigation, pardoning Arpaio will
probably not result in a demand for an impeachment inquiry. But as impeachment pressure increases in the
future (as they will), the Arpaio pardon in the background will be highly
damaging to the Trump’s position. Ultimately,
it will strengthen the arguments of those who have long claimed Trump does not
have the requisite respect for the rule of law, or an understanding of the
meaning of his constitutional oath, to remain the president.

Friday, 28 July 2017

The infighting within Trump’s
White House reached a crescendo this week, with the addition to the menagerie
of mini-me-Trump Anthony Scaramucci and the subsequent and connected ousting of
the buffoonish Sean Spicer and stalwart Republican insider Reince Priebus.